Animacy and Its Constraint on the Realization of Possessive Relations

Animacy, both a universal semantic primitive, and a typological universal in human languages, has a great impact, on the coding of possessive relations in their realisations as possessive constructions in the following aspects:1) the higher in animacy the possessor, the more potential interpretations of the construction; 2) if the possessor is high in the animacy hierarchy, it is interpreted as subject in the construction, otherwise as object; if the possessor is a pronoun, it can be interpreted as either subject or object according to the context, but in Chinese it is interpreted only as subject; 3) the choice of the -'s or of construction increases or decreases with animacy of the possessor; 4) explicit coding of "de"in Chinese or -'s in English is closely correlated with the animacy of the possessor; 5) implicit coding of "de" leads to the change of meaning and construction type, but still keeps the possessive relations, which will shed light on the explanation of the tricky construction "Wangmian si le fuqin".